Upgrading a highly customized phone to ICS+, part 2: Things are looking up

Several days ago I wrote about how I’ve acquired a second Samsung Galaxy S II, in an effort to actually move the extremely heavily customized setup I have on my Gingerbread-based S II to a later version of Android without having to risk it all in one go. We’re not talking about realigning wallpaper here, but rewriting apps, and it’s not done in one go.

Since then, I’ve actually switched ROMs. Paranoid Android just ended up being too slow, showing no signs of Project Butter, and actually being slower than stock Gingerbread. I followed the advice of commenter Geni from the last post, and loaded up the S II with the Chameleon ROM. That choice cost me the per-app DPI settings I had looked forward to in Paranoid Android, but it didn’t take long until it became apparent that Chameleon is just so much more stable and fast. I actually notice the Project Butter improvements now, and even though I still can’t say they’re revolutionary, they certainly don’t hurt.

Other than that, the last few days has been used to gradually implement my old setup. It’s still very far from finished, but I’m starting to recognize the phone as something similar to what I had. Installing, upgrading, and restoring apps takes a while when it has to be done a bit more intelligently than bat running the entire thing, and quite a few apps actually work differently on ICS.

I also installed the new beta version of Tasker, with the new ICS+ UI that is soon coming out to replace the aging old Android 1.5-looking Tasker UI. The new UI is based on the Holo theme of ICS+ devices, and for reasons I don’t understand (since other apps have holo UIs on Gingerbread), that means it won’t work on anything lower than Android 4. Therein lies the reason why I haven’t written much about Tasker in the last few months, a change of pace that you can trace back to the very day that the dev announced the decision to leave Gingerbread behind.

As for the new Tasker UI, I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed. I’m hesitant to call it an improvement, as even though there are areas that are cleaner and easier to understand, there are others that make less sense now than before. The confirm/cancel buttons are gone, with the reason being that it was never quite intuitive what the green checkmark and red X meant from one place in the UI to the next. It’s been replaced by simply going back out of the menu you’re in, which makes total sense in the main Tasker UI. However, if you for instance try to add a shortcut to a task to the home screen, having to actually click “back” in order to confirm that you want to add the shortcut makes very little sense. Whereas there were years worth of posts, screenshots, tutorials, videos, and whatnot about the old UI, there’s nothing for the new one, which I think is going to cause quite a few problems when the new UI is released.

I have to say I feel sorry for Pent, the developer of Tasker. In many ways he’s in the same predicament as me, finally taking on the task of upgrading something despite the knowledge that shit is going to hit the fan in the process. It’s not fun. It’s been almost four months since the last Tasker update now, and I’m sure he’s looking forward to diving back into actually useful features, leaving the dreadful task of poking PNG files all day behind.

Getting my own Tasker creations to work has been mostly painless so far, but then again I’ve only dug into a tiny corner of the pile of profiles and tasks I have. The biggest problem has been with my Gmail notification image profile, and I’ve still not managed to get it working exactly like on Gingerbread, but at least I’m 98% there.

Another thing I discovered is that the Bluetooth issue with the stock Gingerbread ROM I use, which causes connection issues with smart watches like the Sony Ericsson LiveView I have, seems to be gone in the Chameleon ROM. I tried to leave my LiveView connected to the phone for an entire day, and while I didn’t move around with it to see if that triggered any connection losses, at the very least the watch always stayed connected to the phone. I might actually end up looking into something like the MetaWatch if this turns out to be the case, as I’m sure I could do wonders with a proper smart watch and Tasker.

That being said, I’m still not completely sure I want to make the move. For every new feature I find and like on ICS+, there’s something that needs fixing before I can start using the new phone. That being said, most of the issues should be fixable, in which case I’ll end up with a better phone than before. I’m just glad I waited until the opportunity to do this with a second phone arose, as I’d seriously hate trying to do this update in a single go with my existing phone.

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About the Author

Andreas Ødegård was an associate editor at Pocketables. He’s more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets and tends to stick with his choice of device for a long time as a result of that. Currently that includes an iPad mini and a Samsung Galaxy S II.

Geni

Hey I’m glad you tried the rom and liked it, I’m also ecstatic to maybe see more tasker creations.

I notice that using siyah kernel 6.0b5 gives me good battery life and it is really smooth compared to the stock kernel. I aslo notice that after a few weeks the thunderbolt scripts start making the phone slow but u can easily delete them. Also as the developer is not actively giving updates, i’ve been thinking of using a stock samsung rom with a stock jellybean theme, but I probably won’t cos I dont care that much. Using the app greenify makes a big difference when using things like chrome or facebook as JB seems to use a bit more ram then gingerbread.

I seem to find that google now drains the battery to death and have disabled it, could you maybe tell me if you experience this?

Secondly, If you manage to get the gmail noti working again please post your solution, however I feel I should maybe also look into it a bit more just been too busy to play.

I also would like to comment on the tasker ui…maybe I don’t understand this but why is this such an important aspect to people? I mean this is some sorta like a suedo programming language why do ppl care if it’s holo? This all started because of that stupid google team imagining the ui and now pent seems to feel obliged to do this. I aslo wish tasker would maybe get a little more advanced maybe( logcat triggers?). Anyway I hope to see more JB tasker creations. Good Job as always!

Andreas Ødegård

My phone has mostly been left alone, so havent noticed anything with the battery really. Will check out though

Andreas Ødegård

As for the notifier, it’s working in that aside from the statusbar being visible for a split second when it triggers, it works 100%.

I don’t like the Tasker UI focus either, it’s sad to see that silly users who run around using tasker to turn off their wifi when they leave home are allowed to dictate the development cycle of such an app :/

Pavel

Google Now does drain some battery but not that much. What is the cause of battery drain is the “Report from this device” feature, which uploads your location history to Google (in Maps’ settings). Turning that off, should save you quite some battery.

Geni

Thx I’ll try turning off reporting it seems like it is already working (Placebo?)

@Andreas Another thing I forgot to mention, the DPI per app function can be obtained by using Xposed DPI Changer just search xda you’ll find it.

Andreas Ødegård

Thanks, I’ll have to check that out! Not sure how crucial that feature is though, kinda underwhelmed after playing with it a bit while using PA. I think it comes down to me using more custom UIs than anything else